The Promise of Intel’s “The Museum of Me”

Intel’s “The Museum of Me” is an incredible personal visualization that is created using Facebook Connect and the data from your social graph. The incredible web application creates an exhibition that features your friends, photos, locations, words and links that ultimately represent your digital and analog life.

Intel will win more than a few awards for the ground breaking visualization tool for doing what many companies and marketers have struggled with – aggregating your personal data and creating an impressive way to experience it. Intel’s web application just begins to unwrap the potential of what can be done with the wealth of information available from our digital and analog lives.

And Intel’s entrance into visualizing the social graph could certainly be improved. They could have easily allowed you to export the movie so it could be shared with your friends or uploaded to a service like YouTube or Vimeo. While Intel does allow for the ability to export photos to your Facebook profile, it hardly represents the same experience you get in the two minute video. But for all of its short-comings, it certainly can be classified as a success.

The promise of the Internet has always been that our data is stored in the cloud and is accessible from anywhere. And as our society moves towards a digital world that publishes, shares and archives the moments of our lives we have a great opportunity of experiencing it in ways we’ve never seen before.

While we may know who are best friends are and remember a road trip we took those memories often only exist in our minds or as a photo album. Intel shows us that tapping into the potential of networks like Facebook can create amazing visualizations that are a better representation of our experiences and personal network.

Google vs. Facebook. Speculation continues on whether one company will conquer the other, but in the end the two platforms take a very different approach to best connect you to data.

Google tries, and mostly succeeds, in recommending links and content that should be valuable to you from a network of people you have likely never met. Facebook has tried to connect you to your analog networks in a digital world to hopefully better connect you to the same data and content.

And the future may come down to who best visualizes the data collected from the web or curated from your social graph. Imagine the future where you could experience the following:

Your latest vacation visualized based off your geo-location, photos, videos and words that have been collected by your or augmented with information from the web. Perhaps this would be further enriched from blog entries, audio snippets or multiple people contributing their experiences to the larger story of the vacation.

An interactive diary of your life that would be collected over years. Expanding on the above idea, imagine a similar representation of your life in the digital world that could live forever. Future generation would be able to fully explore and scrub through your life for everything from photos and special occasions to quotes and life lessons that were also documented.

Although a morbid topic, imagine the addition of such visual representations of our life at a funeral or a grave site. Something for coming generations to explore and listen to.

Active editing could augment the incomplete information pulled from our social graph. No longer would we need to provide multiple links to multiple services to have others share in our experiences.

If you are concerned about Internet privacy, then Intel’s museum may seem creepy and the only reason you need to adjust your Facebook privacy settings. But such a strong use of our data should be applauded instead of raising concern over our privacy. Yes our memories and most personal information should be protected, but services like Intel’s “The Museum of Me” doesn’t need to collect and keep any of our data to create these types of visualizations.

What are your thoughts? Creepy or useful? A promise of the future or a problem with over sharing in the present? Share your thoughts below.